Obama made the comments as he stood with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen
Harperduring his first trip abroad as president. The two pledged
cooperation on efforts to stimulate the economy, fight terrorism in Afghanistan and develop clean energy technology.

In a joint news conference, Obama said he wants to find a way to keep
his campaign pledge to toughen labor and environmental standards -- and
told Harper so -- but stressed that nothing should disrupt the free flow
of trade between neighbors.

"Now is a time where we've got to be very careful about any signals of
protectionism," the president said. "Because, as the economy of the
world contracts, I think there's going to be a strong impulse on the
part of constituencies in all countries to see if we -- they can engage
in beggar-thy-neighbor policies."

But some longtime observers of the U.S.-Canada relationship said Obama's
current position appears to confirm the impressionthat Canadian
officials got from the meeting with Goolsbee. "It sounds like [Goolsbee] was right," said former Massachusetts
governor Paul Cellucci (R), who served as U.S. ambassador to Canada
during George W. Bush's first term. "It looks like [President Obama has]
softened that quite a bit, to put it mildly."

But some of those allies said Thursday that they are giving the
president more time to make good on his promise and praised Obama for
finding a sophisticated way to express support for trade and changes to
NAFTA.

"I am happy for him to frame his way of positioning the issue any way he
wants,as long as he actually delivers on the issue," said Lori
Wallach, the director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division.
"If down the road Obama doesn't deliver on the policy, there will be a
whole lot of really upset people."

Harper said he has "every expectation" that the United States will abide
by trade rules that forbid such preferences. But he used strong
language to indicate how seriously the country takes that issue.

"If we pursue stimulus packages, the goal of which is only to benefit
ourselves, or to benefit ourselves, worse, at the expense of others, we
will deepen the world recession, not solve it," he said.
Obama and Harper also pledged to work together to battle terrorism,
especially in Afghanistan, where Canadian soldiers have been fighting
and dying for years.

In his first public comments since sending an additional 17,000 troops
to the war-torn country earlier this week,Obama saidthat "it was
necessary to stabilize the situation there in advance of the elections
that are coming up."

The president declined to say how long the troops will remain there,
citing a 60-day review he has ordered. Harper also declined to say
whether his country's troops will remain beyond 2011, but said the
long-term goal of the war should be constrained.

"We are not in the long term, through our own efforts, going to
establish peace and security in Afghanistan. That, that job, ultimately,
can be done only by the Afghans themselves," he said.

The president's trip to Canada was a traditional visit early in his
term. The snow may have subtly reminded him of campaigning in the
Midwest, as he said he was pleased "to be here in Iowa -- Ottawa."

He disappointed many Canadians who had hoped to see him at a public
event. Instead, he waved briefly to a crowd of about 2,000 waiting in
the snow as he walked to his meetings.

He did surprise reporters with a brief stop at a converted indoor
farmers market in a historic stretch of Ottawa afterward. He bought a
keychain with Canadian currency, telling reporters that he was
continuing a tradition of buying knickknacks when he travels.

Obama and Harper also pledged cooperation to revive North America's
closely linked economy and signed an agreement to work toward developing
clean energy technology.

"It will advance carbon reduction technologies. And it will support the
development of an electric grid that can help deliver the clean and
renewable energy of the future to homes and businesses, both in Canada
and the United States," Obama said."

And while Trump has taken steps to accomplish some of these goals — mostly via executive action —
it’s too early to determine how successful he will be in pushing his
agenda through. But, most voters say he’s delivering so far....

With unlimited access to US taxpayer dollars, 'regime change' is an ingenious money laundering operation for parasites.To be part of it, you can have a long track record of continuous failure and a depraved indifference to humanity, with a resume including:

*countless dead and maimed bodies *causing permanent suffering, poverty, and social upheaval across entire continents, *enabling genocide of Christians and forcing them to flee for their lives from various countries

The Washington Post and NY Times like to promote anything that bleeds and punishes the US middle class, and the neocon money laundering operation is no exception. Munitions are purchased and moved around. Then it's on to the next 'regime change.' US neocons have never expressed an interest in protecting the US, its borders, or the people inside them. The War Party just wants us, its global slaves, to shut up and hand over more of our earnings to their royal lifestyle.

We're told we're "racists" if we don't flood our towns with "refugees" created by endless foreign wars. Then we're forced to give billions more of our tax dollars to so-called "religious" groups which are paid by the head to provide "refugees" with US taxpayer funded services when they first get to the US.----------------------Citation for US ability to decree death of nations:

"Americans can be proud of the role
our country has played in helping to defeat Kadafi," the senators said
in a statement released late Sunday night. "But we regret that this
success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to
employ the full weight of our airpower."

The senators said the U.S. "must lead the international community to provide the support that our Libyan friends need."

There is also desperation among some Obama administration officials
because the worsening Libyan fiasco threatens to undermine not only
President Barack Obama’s legacy but Clinton’s drive for...the White House.

Clinton’s State Department email exchanges
revealed that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a
“Clinton doctrine,” bragging about how Clinton’s clever use of “smart
power” could get rid of demonized foreign leaders like Gaddafi. But the
Clinton team was thwarted when President Obama seized the spotlight when
Gaddafi’s government fell.

But Clinton didn’t miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20,
2011, after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and
then murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi’s demise with the quip, “we came; we saw; he died.”

However, with Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way,
Islamic militants expanded their power over the country. Some were
terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned.

One Islamic terror group attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on
Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three
other American personnel, an incident that Clinton called the worst
moment of her four-year tenure as Secretary of State.

But whatever Gaddafi’s guilt in that earlier era, he renounced
terrorism during George W. Bush’s presidency and surrendered his
unconventional military arsenal. He even assisted Bush’s “war on
terror.” So, Gaddafi’s grisly fate has become a cautionary tale for what
can happen to a leader who makes major security concessions to the
United States.

Clinton may claim she has lots of foreign policy experience, butthe
hard truth is that much of her experience has involved makinggrievous
mistakes and bloody miscalculations."
............................................

When a similar question was asked in the third year of Mr. Clinton’s
first term, 45% said news coverage of the president was fairly well
balanced, while about one-third said it was biased against Mr. Clinton
and 16% said it was biased in his favor.

The
Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll was based on nationwide telephone
interviews of 1,000 adults conducted from Feb. 18-22. Overall, the
data’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The
margin of error for subgroups is larger."

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because
its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in
the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits
have left them liberated, andthey are acting out their disdain. Leading
Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their
heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupidand that its heart is in the wrong place.

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his
immigration bill are are unpatriotic -- they "don't want to do what's right
for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said,"We're gonna tell
the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents
wouldprefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos
Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former
Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are
"anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage"and"national
chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of
opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively,
concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a
variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has,day
by dayfor at least the past three years, been tearing apart the
conservative movement.... The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush
administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it
is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the
world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the
liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so
aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance
might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth
of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq....

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is thatthe
Bushes, father and son,though different in many ways, are great
wasters of political inheritance.

They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what
they liked.Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace
with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally,at
great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on
shared principles.Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as
Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's
third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him.And so
he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself
shocked to lose the presidency, and for eight long and consequential
years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative,
garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into
victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that
left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded
to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the
party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces.He
threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already
broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an
ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be
painful, but it's time. It's more than time."

The change-the-subject stunt annoyed some in the Ellison camp. As
Mary Kay Linge and Aaron Short reported in Sunday’s Post, one Democratic
source said Ellison allies had asked de Blasio not to come: “The buzz
is, what the f–k was he doing here?”

After all, the mayor has built a rep not so much as a progressive
leader but as a progressive opportunist. During the long Bernie
Sanders-Hillary Clinton contest for the 2016 presidential nomination, he
first tried (and failed) to play power broker, as with his unsuccessful
efforts to make both candidates attend his own issues forum.

Perhaps de Blasio was looking to reconnect with the Bernie bros by
going all-in for Ellison: Sanders and American Federation of Teachers
chief Randi Weingarten were the two main speakers when Ellison announced
for the job.

In the end, though, former Labor Secretary Tom Perez — the preferred candidate of former President Barack Obama — won.

6 of 10, "Karl Rove": The main attraction of course is DJ Jazzy Rover here. At the 2007
Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner, the Architect himself
revealed his most frightening persona — MC Rove. Which is really the
laziest hip-hop name he could have come up with. Ol' Dirty Rove? Rove
Dogg? Ice-K? We're not even trying here. Also, he apparently believes
that rapping can only occur with a deep, faux-gravelly voice.
Shockingly embarrassing, no matter your politics."...

That caused rates for
super-catastrophe insurance to fall, leading Berkshire to back away from
the products, according to Buffett. Costlier and more frequent
"super-cats" would actually likely benefit Berkshire's insurance
business, he wrote.

At the time the letter was
released, Buffett was facing a proposal from a shareholder that asked
Berkshire to report on the dangers climate change poses to the company's
insurance operations.

Research shows it is premature to conclude
greenhouse gas emissions from human activities "have already had a
detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone
activity," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration."...

For three years,
violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of
repression. They posted notices warning residents:

“Don’t send your
children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get
the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed
workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They
trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.

This is convoluted
nonsense, but Americans cannot be blamed for believing it. We have
almost no real information about the combatants, their goals, or their
tactics. Much blame for this lies with our media.

Inevitably, this
kind of disinformation has bled into the American presidential campaign.
At the recentdebate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United
Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on “an agreement I negotiated
in June of 2012 in Geneva.”

The precise opposite is true.In 2012
Secretary of State Clintonjoined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a
successful effort to kill Kofi Annan’s UN peace plan because it would
have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No
one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her.

2/24/2017, "Syrian War Propaganda at the Oscars," Consortium News, Rick Sterling"The Western-backed war in Syria, like the invasion of Iraq, was so
smothered by propaganda that truth was not only the first casualty but
has been steadily suffocated for five years, now reaching the Oscars,
says Rick Sterling.

"The Netflix movie "The White Helmets" may win an Oscar in the “short
documentary” category at the Academy Awards on Sunday. It would not be a
surprise despite the fact that the group is a fraud and the movie is a
contrived infomercial.

Much of what people think they know about the White Helmets is
untrue. The group is not primarily Syrian; it was initiated by British
military contractor James LeMesurier and has been heavily funded (about
$100 million) by the U.S., U.K. and other governments.The White Helmets
are not volunteers; they are paid, which is confirmed in a Al Jazeera video that shows some White Helmet “volunteers” talking about going on strike if they don’t get paid soon.

Still, most of the group’s heavy funding goes to marketing, which is
run by “The Syria Campaign” based in New York. The manager is an
Irish-American, Anna Nolan, who has never been to Syria. As an example
of its deception, “The Syria Campaign” website
features video showing children dancing and playing soccer implying
they are part of the opposition demand for a “free and peaceful” Syria.

But the video images are taken from a 2010 BBC documentaryabout education in Syria under the Baath government.

There is also something almost dated about the Academy selecting this
infomercial as an Oscar finalist, let alone the possibility of giving
it the award. It’s as if the Syrian propaganda narrative of “good”
rebels vs. “bad” governmentwas still viable. In the case of the White
Helmets, they were literally made into “white hats” bravely resisting
the government’s “black hats.”

Yet, we now know that the propaganda around the “noble” rebels
holding out in east Aleppo– with the help of the White Helmets – was
largely a lie. The rebels mostly fought under the command structure of
Al Qaeda’s Nusra affiliate and its fellow jihadists in Ahrar al-Sham. A video shows
White Helmet workers picking up the corpse of a civilian after
execution by Nusra/Al Qaeda and celebrating the extremists’ battle wins.

Soon after departing Aleppo in government-supplied buses, the White
Helmets showed up in the mountains above Damascus where they allied with
terrorist groups responsible for poisoning and then shutting off the water sourcefor five million people in Damascus.

Neither Neutral Nor Independent

The White Helmets’s claim to be neutral and independent is another
lie. They only work in areas controlled by the rebel groups, primarily
Al Qaeda’s Nusra, and their leaders seek to bring in direct U.S. and
NATO military intervention to assure a “regime change”in Syria although
it likely would create a vacuum that the extremists would exploit to
the further suffering of the Syrian people.

Khaled Khatib, the White Helmets’s photographer who says he filmed the footage inside Syria, reportedly received a U.S. visa and will attend the Oscars. Khatib tweeted
the first video he took showing the White Helmets, with a girl who was
totally buried being removed without injuries or wounds or even much
dirt.

The original video has the logo of Aleppo Media Center (AMC), which was created by the Syrian Expatriates Organization.
Their address on K Street in Washington DCsuggests this is yet another
Western-funded operation similar to the Iraqi National Congress that
lobbied and lied on behalf of the 2003 invasion of Iraq
.In the past few days, with perfect timing for the upcoming Oscars, there was yet another “miracle” rescue, another girl buried but then removed and whisked away in record-breaking time – perfect for social media.

The momentum in support of the White Helmets infomercial raises a
question about how this Oscar is awarded. Is it for journalistic
authenticity or is it to conform with the political passions of the
moment, which themselves are partly contrived by a well-funded
propaganda campaign mounted by Western/Israeli/Gulf governments.

Investigative Reports

The true source and real purpose of the White Helmets were exposed
almost two years ago by investigative journalists. Max Blumenthal has
written a two-part detailed examination of the “shadowy PR firm” behind the White Helmets. And Jan Oberg has written an overview survey of the “pro” and “con” examinations in his work “Just How Gray are the White Helmets”.

Map of Syria

More recently, Vanessa Beeley has documented the fact that the White
Helmets pretends to be the Syrian Civil Defense when there is a real Syrian Civil Defense, which
was begun in the 1950s and is a member of the International Civil
Defense Organizations. The White Helmets group was launched as “Syria
Civil Defense” in Turkey in 2013 before being re-branded as the “White
Helmets” in 2014.

According to on-the-ground interviews in Aleppo, militants began
supplying this operation by killing real Syrian rescue workers and
stealing their equipment. Since then the White Helmets have been
supplied by the West through Turkey with brand new ambulances and
related rescue equipment.

Despite exposés about the group, the West’s mainstream media and some
“alternative” outlets continue to uncritically promote the White
Helmets myth and rely on the group as a source of news about Syria. In
2014-2015, the White Helmets became a rallying point for columnist Nicholas Kristof, the activist group Avaaz and others to campaign for all-out Western assault on the Syrian government and its military.

Perhaps ironically – given the Israeli government’s desire for a
“regime change” in Syria – the Israeli mainstream TV program I24
presented both sides of the issue and titled the segment “White Helmets:
Heroes or Hoax?” By contrast, the progressive program “DemocracyNow” in
the United States has only broadcast a puff piece promoting the “White Helmet” disinformation.